Students from Western Avenue Elementary School in Geneva wait to tour the Farnsworth House near Plano, Ill. (Antonio Perez, Chicago Tribune)

Preservationists consider pricey hydraulics to protect Mies van der Rohe masterpiece from floodwaters

The essence of the Farnsworth House's elegant, less-is-more beauty can be described in a single, inelegant term: site-specific. Located 58 miles southwest of Chicago this white, precisely honed box of steel and glass is all the more striking because architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe poetically contrasted it with its colorful, ever-changing surroundings —- trees, meadows and a seemingly peaceful river.

Yet the Fox River has shown little respect for Mies' brilliant juxtaposition of the natural and the man-made. In the past 18 years, the river has inundated the house three times. The worst flood, in 1996, smashed one of the home's huge plate-glass windows, sending more than 5 feet of water inside and causing thousands of dollars in damage. Mies, ironically, designed the house's stiltlike columns to avoid just such a calamity.

Confronted with the prospect of more flooding, the house's owner is carefully weighing how to preserve and protect the house, two goals that potentially conflict. Keep the house where it is, and the river is almost sure to flood it again someday. Move the house away from the river to higher ground, and its authenticity would be compromised. Such are the choices in an era when disastrous "100-year floods" seem to occur every few years.

Is there a middle way? The owner, the Washington-based National Trust for Historic Preservation, believes it may have one. The trust is considering a daring plan that would temporarily move the house from its site, build a pit beneath it and insert hydraulic jacks that would lift the house out of harm's way the next time the Fox attacks it. Or so goes the plan, which seems like something out of a science fiction movie.

The trust will present this and two other long-term options in Chicago on Monday and Tuesday at a closed-door meeting of architects and preservationists. A public meeting will be held May 29. Work on the house could start next winter. Whatever option is selected, the Farnsworth — originally a country retreat, now a house museum — will have to be temporarily moved so its foundations can be rebuilt or replaced.

"It's concerning to us that the house has already flooded a number of times," said Stephanie Meeks, the trust's president, who discussed the proposals with the Tribune last week. "Given the research, we feel compelled as the stewards of this property to take that threat seriously and consider what our options are." She and the organization's board of trustees have not settled on a plan, she said.

The options are not cheap. A consultant's report estimates that the hydraulic system would cost $2.5 million to $3 million. Another plan, whose top price is pegged at $2.9 million, would place the Farnsworth atop a sloping, 9-foot-high mound built on the home's current site. The third option, a relative bargain at $300,000 to $400,000, would move the house to high ground several hundred feet from the river, but it's almost surely a non-starter.

When a group of preservationists bought the house for more than $7.5 million at a tension-filled 2003 Sotheby's auction, it argued that the Farnsworth belonged in only one place — not on some estate in the Hamptons, but near the Fox River, precisely where Mies and his client, Chicago doctor Edith Farnsworth, put it 1951. Moving the Farnsworth House so far from its original site would violate that precept. It also would destroy the house's serenity by placing it close to nearby River Road, which gets its share of noisy cars and trucks even if it isn't the Dan Ryan Expressway.

To its credit, the trust has arrived at this critical juncture carefully. A study it commissioned found that flooding poses a greater risk to the Farnsworth House now than ever before. The trust also convened a technical advisory panel including respected figures such as Chicago architectDirk Lohan, Mies' grandson. The panel concluded that the hydraulic system was the "most promising" option.

A subsequent study, by the engineering firm Robert Silman Associates, fleshed out that option, saying something more complex is needed than a conventional hydraulic lift that raises a car in a repair garage. Instead, the firm envisions below-ground steel trusses that, when activated, would shift from a horizontal position to a vertical one, raising the house on a concrete slab, as if it were a trophy on a plate. Once floodwaters were pumped out of the pit, the house could be lowered.

The audacious hydraulics proposal could simultaneously allow the trust to preserve and protect the house, yet it's far from a sure thing: Would its construction disrupt the surrounding landscape? Are there less expensive, less intrusive solutions that would rely more on landscaping than technology, which, as we all know, can sometimes go haywire?

"I think one of the risks is that this is a new application of an old technology," Meeks said. "The risk is overcoming the question mark in people's minds. People will want to be satisfied that it's the simplest solution." Mies himself was a master of the difficult art of the simple. It remains to be seen whether the hydraulics plan is an appropriate match for him and his riverfront masterpiece.

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